A major feature of the PROTECT IP Act, introduced by 11 senators of all stripes, would grant the government the authority to bring lawsuits against these websites, and obtain court orders requiring search engines like Google to stop displaying links to them.

“Both law enforcement and rights holders are currently limited in the remedies available to combat websites dedicated to offering infringing content and products,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and the bill’s main sponsor.

The proposal is an offshoot to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act introduced last year. It was scrapped by its authors in exchange for the PROTECT IP Act in a bid to win Senate passage.

Under the old COICA draft, the government was authorized to obtain court orders to seize so-called generic top-level domains ending in .com, .org and .net The new legislation (PDF), with the same sponsors, narrows that somewhat. Instead of allowing for the seizure of domains, it allows the Justice Department to obtain court orders demanding American ISPs to stop rendering the DNS for a particular website—meaning the sites would still be accessible outside the United States.

Either way, though, the legislation amounts to the Holy Grail of intellectual-property enforcement that the recording industry, movie studios and their union and guild workforces have been clamoring for since the George W. Bush administration.

“As the guilds and unions that represent 400,000 creators, performers and craftspeople who create the multitude of diverse films, television programs and sound recordings that are enjoyed by billions of people around the world, we unequivocally support this bill which, by providing protection for our members’ work, clearly shows that our government will not condone or permit the wholesale looting of the American economy and American creativity and ingenuity—regardless of how that looting is disguised on the internet to fool the American consumer,” (PDF) a host of unions said Wednesday, including the American Federation of Musicians, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists and, among others, the Directors Guild of America.

The new bill also gives content owners more rights than the old bill. It would allow rights holders to seek court orders instructing online ad services and credit card companies from partnering with the infringing sites—a power the government is granted from either legislative version.

Only the government gets the DNS blocking powers. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act already grants rights holders the ability to demand search engines to stop displaying search results to infringing sites.

Despite the new bill watering down the United States’ reach, the government has been invoking an asset-forfeiture law to seize generic, top-level domains of infringing websites under a program called Operation in Our Sites.” It began last year and the Department of Homeland Security has targeted 120 sites.

Abigail Phillips, a copyright attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because of Operation in Our Sites, the DNS changeover “doesn’t seem all that meaningful.”

Sherwin Siy, deputy legal director at Public Knowledge, noted that the measure does not narrowly define the websites that could be targeted.

“The bill still defines a site as ‘dedicated to infringing activities’ if it is designed or marketed as ‘enabling or facilitating’ actions that are found to be infringing,” he said. “In other words, even if the site isn’t itself infringing copyright, if its actions ‘enable or facilitate’ someone else’s infringement, the government can tell ISPs to blacklist your site, and copyright holders can sue to cut your funding.”

This really needs to be crushed and quickly. The government needs to leave the internet alone, and the IP holders need to stop bribing our officials to enforce their flawed business model. Every further step that allows the government to restrict our internet access is another step away from freedom.

I have an honest question and I am not being sarcastic. How is this going to do any good. Those who willfully infringe will just remember the Ip address. It is just as easy to type in an address bar 208.95.172.130 instead of isohunt.com Not to mention the majority of willful infringement occurs in semi-closed communities that you have to register.

I really just see this as a way to make DNS less useful. Additionally, what stops me from pointing my router to a DNS server off shore? How hard will it be to put firmware in a router to use the alternate DNS lookup server if its blocked. And wont this make the internet less stable with people using less than reliable DNS servers just to get to their file-sharing sites. Will this just escalate the problem of Phishing schemes? Additionally how does this address sites like Rapid-share?

I really see this as the latest iteration of wack-a-mole. It will only help keep honest people honest. It wont stop infringement at all.

The biggest problem, I have is sites that have legitimate uses being banned from the internet because someone deemed it as “dedicated to infringing activities.” What does this do for You-tube? Additionally, does this law effectively erase the Safe Harbor protections of the DMCA? I see the language as way to vague and doing more harm than good. It will never stop file sharing infringement it will just push it farther underground. However, the repercussions on legitimate web services are profound.

OR....is the ISP physically preventing me from connecting in the first place. Again, how will that work against mirrors and vpn's. Seriously, the Internet was designed to prevent this kind of censorship in the first place. I think our law makers are just pissing in the wind on this one.

Yes, this is government's way of pushing the internet toward a decentralized alternative to DNS, and away from .com, .net, and .org domains. Also see P2P DNS for why this will be ineffective for its intended purpose, even while its unintended consequences further reduce government's ability to deal with serious crime.

the only way out of this is to get some seriously draconian measures there which will physically affect most of the population, and other industries - it is only at that point that the whole legal copyright fiasco will untangle.

Therefore, sooner they get "serious" about it, and really strangle, sue, disconnect and censor the people faster we will get rid of them, thus overall, this law has to be supported, it is a little weak, but not too bad. With copyright we will have to go "medieval" first before we come out free on the other side.

The problem with this law is not that it is not very effective: The problem is one of cost/benefit, if a law costs nothing and has no side effects for law abiding citizens then it is a good law even if only manages to stop 1% of crimes. The problem with this law is that it is prone to abuse, it is costly AND it is not very effective: i.e. people who want to download infringing content may still easily do so, but there is a real chance non infringing services will become unavailable because they could be potentially used for copyright abuse.

I have an honest question and I am not being sarcastic. How is this going to do any good. Those who willfully infringe will just remember the Ip address. It is just as easy to type in an address bar 208.95.172.130 instead of isohunt.com Not to mention the majority of willful infringement occurs in semi-closed communities that you have to register.

I really just see this as a way to make DNS less useful. Additionally, what stops me from pointing my router to a DNS server off shore? How hard will it be to put firmware in a router to use the alternate DNS lookup server if its blocked. And wont this make the internet less stable with people using less than reliable DNS servers just to get to their file-sharing sites. Will this just escalate the problem of Phishing schemes? Additionally how does this address sites like Rapid-share?

I really see this as the latest iteration of wack-a-mole. It will only help keep honest people honest. It wont stop infringement at all.

The biggest problem, I have is sites that have legitimate uses being banned from the internet because someone deemed it as “dedicated to infringing activities.” What does this do for You-tube? Additionally, does this law effectively erase the Safe Harbor protections of the DMCA? I see the language as way to vague and doing more harm than good. It will never stop file sharing infringement it will just push it farther underground. However, the repercussions on legitimate web services are profound.

OR....is the ISP physically preventing me from connecting in the first place. Again, how will that work against mirrors and vpn's. Seriously, the Internet was designed to prevent this kind of censorship in the first place. I think our law makers are just pissing in the wind on this one.

I suspect the powers that be see this as an incremental step. The idea of forcing people to enter an IP address into the browser provides a guilty step that tempted but otherwise honest people would avoid, if they understand that DNS will not resolve to that IP because it is blacklisted by the government. Even the lazy pirate will cross that barrier without notice. If, on the other hand, DNS is marginalized in the process and regular people habituate to regularly entering the IP address into the browser this effort by Congress will become moot and the IP holders will have to come up with a more draconian approach to lobby on.

As for the closed communities of IP sharers, they involve even greater risk. When they are breached by law enforcement no one is going to shed a tear for those who benefited from the infringement as they will be perceived as a den of thieves. If you're going to flout the law in secret, the people who aren't privy and don't benefit will tear you apart.

I wonder how the Barbra Streisand's of Hollywood deal with this? Must be horribly conflicted to approach every policy topic with an eye towards how Dennis Kucinich votes and then have to deal with defending 'draconian' rules around IP protection. I suspect that if it ever comes up at dinner parties they simply change the subject.

I can only conclude that the sponsors and supporters of this bill don't really understand how the Internet works.

This will burden US-based search companies with idiotic (and impossible) regulations, and will at best inconvenience anyone determined to locate what they want.

Stupid, pointless, and ultimately succeeding in nothing but another step toward a fractured net.

The 'fracturing' is inevitable. The seamless nature of the Internet that we, in many regards, experience today will no doubt cause our children to wax poetic. To expect that the whole world and all its various cultures and all its legal jurisdictions will not work to undermine and fracture it to a point where it only just works is, I suspect, unrealistic. All the technical know-how and goodwill pales in comparison to the sum of human self-interest in this instance. Can't we have anything nice around here?

I can only conclude that the sponsors and supporters of this bill don't really understand how the Internet works.

This will burden US-based search companies with idiotic (and impossible) regulations, and will at best inconvenience anyone determined to locate what they want.

Stupid, pointless, and ultimately succeeding in nothing but another step toward a fractured net.

The 'fracturing' is inevitable. The seamless nature of the Internet that we, in many regards, experience today will no doubt cause our children to wax poetic. To expect that the whole world and all its various cultures and all its legal jurisdictions will not work to undermine and fracture it to a point where it only just works is, I suspect, unrealistic. All the technical know-how and goodwill pales in comparison to the sum of human self-interest in this instance. Can't we have anything nice around here?

The terminology in this article could use some cleaning up. The proposed legislation is not primarily about seizing "generic top-level domains" or a "top-level domains." Examples of top-level domains include .com, .edu, .us and .mil. Generic top-level domains are an even smaller set, consisting of only .gov, edu, .com, .mil, .org and .net. The proposed legislation appears directed primarily at second-level domains. The Wikipedia article referenced in the article gives a decent overview of the correct use of the terminology.

Blech. What a horrid bill. Any recommendations for fighting it? I can of course write my senator and/or representative. Which I just might do in this case. But since the big industries are lobbying for this bill, are there any sane groups that will lobby against it? Any groups I could donate money to, and I wouldn't regret that action in the future?

IP blocking is probably the best available technical means of reducing piracy.

When lame asses are pirating $1 Android games for premium smartphones it certainly isn't a problem of ability to pay.

You can't eliminate it but you can reduce casual and open market piracy.

There not blocking ip addresses. There blocking DNS or domain names. If you can remember the Ip address you can still get to the website. Not to mention if you can get a vpn you can get around Dns blocking pretty easy. Its not going to stop A DAMN THING.